Two of my favorite things: puzzles + cooking memoirs
I remember the first book of Ruth Reichl’s I ever read – it was Tender at the Bone, in theory a memoir but really an expression of her passionate belief that your meals (and the making of them) shape who you are in a very tangible way, starting even in the earliest parts of childhood. I loved it so much that I read her other books as soon as they came out: first Comfort Me With Apples, then Garlic and Sapphires, about her stint as the New York Times’ food critic and all the subterfuge and drama (really) that job entails. Now I’m on to her latest, My Kitchen Year, about the shuttering of Gourmet when she was the magazine’s editor-in-chief and her subsequent depression.
I don’t always love Ruth Reichl – she can get a little treacly – but I can’t stop reading her. And the biggest reason why I go back to her, over and over again, is the recipes; she essentially pioneered the memoir-peppered-with-recipe format that’s so popular today. Granted, the recipes I’ve made from these books haven’t always been the best ones on the planet – the matzoh brei was, in a word, a disaster – but when I’m reading her descriptions of how a dish didn’t just exist in her life, but explained it somehow, giving her something that she hadn’t even known she needed, I’m always desperate to try it for myself.
In My Kitchen Year, she describes this cider-braised pork shoulder as a bit of an undertaking – you need to happen to own a pot big enough to hold nine pounds of pork (which I thought I did, but as it turns out: ah…I don’t). You need to be super hungry, or feeding a fairly significant number of people, because holy that is a lot of meat. It needs to occur to you that you will want to eat the thing a full 24 hours ahead of time. But when I read her recipe, I started immediately fantasizing about a kitchen filled with the scent of simmering cider, and so I shaped a good deal of this weekend – trips to the aquarium in Monterey, trips to Children’s Fairyland in Oakland, trips to Los Gatos to visit our favorite toy store – around the hours I’d need to spend in the kitchen to make that pork shoulder happen. And then I decided to throw an impromptu dinner party on Saturday night primarily so we’d have some help in the consumption department.
The party – six adults, five kids, lots of wine, an unbelievable amount of popcorn strewn across the living room carpet, semi-traumatized dogs, everyone staying up way too late – was so much fun; the kind of fun that makes me feel like we’re not just “living here,” but actually have a life here.
But you know what the best part of the weekend was?
On Friday night, Kendrick and I put the kids to bed and went into the kitchen to get started on the shoulder – the recipe requires that you crosshatch the fat and then poke little slits in the skin, pushing in slivered garlic cloves before cooking the thing for hours and leaving it to rest in the refrigerator overnight. We had just lifted the meat out of its wrapper when we heard the THUMP THUMP THUMP that is the sound of little kid feet when they think that they are being sneaky, and Indy’s head popped around the corner. It was late; probably an hour beyond when he usually goes to bed. The rule is that he’s not supposed to get up after lights-out except to go to the bathroom, or for an emergency. But he said he wanted to help cook.
And so we stood there, the three of us in our night kitchen, and together we caramelized onions, and sliced garlic cloves, and measured out cups of cider. We talked about why we brown meat and why onions change color when they cook. We figured out the best way to turn nine pounds of pork (it’s seriously hard), and talked about how crazy it is that heat transforms food; it’s like a trick, something a witch or a sorcerer might do.
The next night, when everyone sat down around the table to eat, the kids cross-legged around the coffee table or on their mom and dad’s laps, Indy pointed to the pork and said “I made that dinner.” And I thought to myself, you know, he did. Not, like, “aw how cute our four-year-old is pretending he cooked”; like for real he made it, just as much as Kendrick or I did. We did it together: three people standing in a row in a warm kitchen late at night, making a little magic.
These kinds of meals do shape a life, in a very real way. And I think they’re worth breaking a rule or two for.
If you make this, please eat the leftovers the next day on some soft Hawaiian rolls. Trust me.
RUTH REICHL’S CIDER-BRAISED PORK SHOULDER (with some slight adaptations based on my own experience making the dish)
Serves a bazillion.
What You Need:
- 8-9 pounds pork shoulder (bone-in)
- 1 1/2 cups apple cider
- 3 garlic cloves
- salt
- pepper
- 6 large onions
- 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
What You Do:
- Score the skin of the pork shoulder into a crosshatch pattern, cutting down through the fat to the meat (a super-sharp knife makes this process way easier). Then take a thin-bladed knife and pierce little slits all over the pork. Cut the garlic into slivers and poke them into the slits, then shower the meat liberally with salt and freshly ground pepper.
- Cut the onions by halving them lengthwise and then ribboning them into long slices. Set them aside while you heat a couple of tablespoons of vegetable oil in a heavy pot and brown the pork on all sides.
- Remove the meat to a platter and add the onions to the pot. Cook, stirring occasionally, until they’re fragrant, golden, and caramelized (I added a little garlic powder at this point ’cause I love it, but you don’t have to).
- Stir in 1 1⁄2 teaspoons of salt and the apple cider, return the pork to the pot, cover it securely, and put it into a 325-degree oven for 3 hours. Note: I thought our pot was big enough – it’s a really big pot – but nope. So I just put the cover on top and then wrapped the gap between the lid and the pot with foil, and it seemed to work just fine.
- After 3 hours remove the pot from the oven, uncover it, and allow it to cool. Put the cover back on and set the pot in the refrigerator overnight.
- Two or three hours before you plan to serve dinner, take the pot out of the refrigerator and lift off and discard the fat that’s risen to the top (I just scooped it out with a big spoon, being careful not to remove the onion mixture below). Allow the meat to come back to room temperature, then reheat it in a 325° oven for another hour. Note: I flipped the meat and splashed over a little more cider – maybe half a cup – before doing this, and it was so juicy and amazing.
- Lift the pork onto a platter and return the pot of cider and onions to the stove. Bring it to a boil and let it cook furiously until it reduces a bit. Season to taste.
- Reichl doesn’t specify how to serve this dish, but I returned the meat to the pot and shredded it with two knives so that it combined with the onion-cider sauce, and it was insane. (Note: It’s now two days later and I’m eating it on a soft roll, as pictured above; equally insane.)
